Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding,Emplacement,and Spatial Desire

Abstract

In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders’ skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: “kind” and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore.

Keywords

senses materializing urban landscape self-built environments

Introduction

In this journal, Vivoni (2009) argued for the “emergence of skateboarding terrains as sites for both practicing and contesting urban governance” (p. 130). Through his below-the-knees approach, he unveiled urban politics on the ground and spatial appropriation in purpose-built spaces for skateboarding, found spaces, and vernacular landscapes (Jackson, 1984). Vivoni suggested that daily skateboarding routines hold the political potential to transform cities into inclusive spaces. Complicating the dichotomy between found do-it-yourself skate spots and purpose-built skateboard spaces as corporate brand-building tools, he argued for embracing skateboarding’s spatial desire and ethics. Vivoni (2009, p. 142) described the skateboarder’s spatial desire as “keen perception and savvy mobility [that] enable the experience of unimagined pleasures throughout the built environment” and argued that skaters “feel the city in search of hidden spots waiting to be usurped.” In this article, we explicitly explore his second statement and draw from his idea of spatial desire. However, in contrast to the unimagined pleasures that Vivoni discussed, we considered them to be highly imaginable as embodied and in situ, that is, emplaced.

As an alternative sport (e.g., Bäckström, 2013; Beal, 1995; Borden, 2001; Young, 2004), skateboarding connotes unruliness, particularly in urban environments and in relation to other peoples’ more accepted use of the city (Borden, 2001; Jenson, Swords, & Jeffries, 2012; Woolley, Hazelwood, & Simkins, 2011; Woolley & Johns, 2001). Nonetheless, contemporary street skateboarding in northern Europe has developed into an expected and largely accepted form of youthful urban physical activity. Both Denmark and Sweden are progressive in terms of present-day urban spatial development for multiple groups of citizens (Fabian & Samson, 2015; Jönsson & Holgersen, 2017; Kortbæk, 2013; Lieberg, 1995; Petersen, 2014). Local authorities, municipalities, as well as public and private funding around these countries support various ways to add architectural features to existing urban spaces and to create street-sport facilities where skateboarding is possible. These street-sport facilities are both situated in the margins of urban life, hidden from the risk of public conflict through competing use of the same space, and in close vicinity to highly populated localities or even amid flows of people. The efforts are both initiated by local authorities and installed by private companies. Moreover, they are made in collaboration with skateboarders and sometimes by skateboarders themselves. Professionals with dual careers, both skateboarders and architects, engage in this endeavor (see de Fine Licht, 2017).

Despite the social tendency to developed designated facilities for a given activity, skateboarders do not restrain their practice to areas constructed for skateboarding purposes. On the contrary, urban environments outside of designed spaces continue to attract skateboarders. Are skateboarders significantly hard to please? Is this a sign of practicing and contesting urban governance? Or do we have to look at the particular ways in which skateboarders experience their practice and the environment to fully understand what is at stake? Without undercutting the importance of the two first questions, we focus on the latter in this article. To understand the attraction of urban material encounters through skateboarding, or, as Vivoni put it, “the spatial desire,” we analyze selected empirical material from two different ethnographic studies focusing on various aspects of skateboarding in Denmark and in Sweden. We discuss skateboarding both in skateparks (i.e., designated spaces for this activity that often have obstacles resembling those found in urban settings, such as stairs and railings) and in city spaces whose material environment was not purposefully built for skateboarding. We draw from Vivoni’s (2009) conceptualization of spatial desire and develop his thinking by adding an anthropological-phenomenological (Ingold, 2000, 2010, 2013) approach to explore the relationship between materiality and imagination. Simultaneously, we continue to complicate the dichotomy between found do-it-yourself skatespots and purpose-built skateboard spaces. Inspired by spatial thinking (see Lefebvre, 1991, 2004; Massey, 2005), our aim is to describe and analyze how skateboarders develop their encounters with material urban space by imagining and practicing movement through it. In doing so, we provide new empirical findings on emplacement and skateboarding, adding to previous research on skateboarding and spatiality. In particular, we add a phenomenological and intentional component to what Vivoni (2009) named spatial desire. More specifically, we raise the following research questions in this article: How can we understand and explain skateboarders’ spatial desire, and, related to this question, how is imagination part of the process?

We start by describing selected research on skateboarding and other uses of urban space relevant for our study, which is followed by a theoretical discussion of the key concepts that we employed in our analysis: emplacement, imagination, making, and spatial desire. The methodological section offers an account of our respective ethnographic data and how we collected and analyzed it. In the following empirical section, we use our theoretical conceptualizations to analyze our data. We employ empirical categories to define the analytical themes to raise a bottom-up discussion about how imagined and emplaced practices among skateboarders can be rethought and understood. Finally, we discuss our findings and the implications they have for how we might understand skateboarders’ spatial desire, which can be theoretically generalized to many other categories of urban movers. To sum up, this article provides new empirical findings and engages with previous theoretical work that has been sparsely used in the emerging field of movement culture studies.

Alternative Urban Engagements

The early years of skateboarding formed a solid ground for subcultural values, including resistance against authorities, which would persist for decades to come (Beal, 1995; Borden, 2001; Yochim, 2010). Subsequently, street skateboarding, with its subcultural and alternative content, became a permissible target for urban governance and policies (Bäckström, 2013; Borden, 2001; Flusty, 1997, 2000; Freeman & Riordan, 2002; Jones & Graves, 2000; Németh, 2006; Stratford, 2002; Woolley et al., 2011; Woolley & Johns, 2001). Geographically confining skateboarding to designated spaces ensured public safety (Jenson et al., 2012) but imposed more rules on practitioners (Howell, 2008; O’Connor, 2016). In the United States, purpose-built environments, such as skateparks and plazas, were also often commercialized settings that fostered brand identities (Vivoni, 2009). In Vivoni’s study, skateboarders weave in and out of found and purpose-built terrains, and by doing so, they elude fixed categorizations. According to Vivoni (2009, p. 145), public skateparks both “marginalize skateboarders from city centres and serve as training grounds for appropriating urban spaces [. . .], their spatial desires unfold somewhere in between domination and resistance.” Exploiting built urban environments is practiced through an ethic of care (Vivoni, 2013). In recent years, skateboarding’s shift from an alternative to a mainstream sport and culture has included its increasing incorporation into both commercial and governmental processes (Lombard, 2010).

In his now classic study on skateboarding and urban architecture, Borden (2001) discussed how skateboarders “performed” the city through their dismissive approach to both convention and authority. “Skateboarding’s marks, scratches and other material manifestations are only the traces of much deeper critique of contemporary urban life” (Borden, 2001, p. 263). Borden identified a shift regarding the use of cities as sites of production, of ownership, and of purpose. Skateboarders’ uses of urban space show a shift from the city as a site of production toward the city as a site for play, desires, and actions. In terms of ownership, skateboarders understand the richness of urban ground in terms of social wealth rather than proprietorship. Skateboarders also value space for its usefulness more highly than for its worth in exchanges.

Similar to skateboarders, practitioners of parkour use the urban landscape in unintended ways. Exploring the potential of misuse as a form of empowerment, Lamb (2014) discussed how parkour challenged the disciplinary power in the built environment. Parkour, known as the art of displacement, could be defined as an art of movement focusing on both original and creative ways to negotiate city spaces (Bavinton, 2007, p. 392). Lamb described parkour as a practice that “displaces restricted and conventional uses of space with creative, free-flowing or playful movements, which challenges social expectations of use” (Lamb, 2014, p. 109). In a similar vein, Højbjerre Larsen (2015) illustrated how parkour in Denmark has been transformed from a self-organized, freely flowing practice to an institutionalized practice that is planned, organized, and performed. An essential finding in Larsen’s study was that self-organized parkour and its sensory material practices can be understood as a certain kind of craftsmanship.

Experiencing and Imagining Urban Space

In the following, we discuss and outline our thinking around four key concepts: emplacement, imagination, making, and spatial desire. To understand the attraction of urban material encounters in skateboarding (i.e., spatial desire), its qualities, and how it works, we need an epistemology that allows us to describe how humans’ moving bodies interact with materiality and take the surrounding social space into account at the same time.

In this article, we acknowledge how a shift from embodiment to emplacement could expand our thinking in new ways (e.g., Bäckström, 2014; Pink, 2011). This shift in our scientific vocabulary has the potential to direct our thinking beyond the body and beyond ourselves and the human. Several scholars within phenomenology and human geography have dealt with this; according to Thrift (2008), it is not sufficient to focus on body awareness alone. With the concept of “body-a-where-ness,” Thrift emphasized the situated body when trying to understand urban practices (Thrift, 2008, p. 126). Similarly, Grosz (1992) described the body as “citified” and stressed a certain interdependence between the body and the city. “The city is made, and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed, ‘citified,’ urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body” (Grosz, 1992, p. 242). We understand this as the body being attuned to the city. Just like Lefebvre’s (1991) dialectic perspective on space and social practice, Grosz argued that the body and city influence each other in a dialectic relationship. Furthermore, Grosz argued that this interrelationship contributes reflections and ideas of future possibilities. According to Grosz,

the city is a product not simply of the muscles and energy of the body, but the conceptual and reflective possibilities of consciousness itself: the capacity to design, to plan ahead, to function as an intentionality and thereby be transformed in the process. (Grosz, 1992, p. 245)

Similarly, Borden (2001) described how skateboarders “re-image architectural space and thereby recreate both it and themselves into a super-architectural space” (p. 89). From a phenomenological and anthropological perspective, Ingold focused on critiquing Western history inspired by Aristotle, who argued that form (morphe) and matter (hyle) needed to be brought together to understand how to create things (Ingold, 2010, p. 2). Ingold argued for replacing the hylomorphic model with an ontology that nuances material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape (Ingold, 2013, p. 20). When we discuss processes of making below, we refer to his epistemological understanding.

Ingold (2000) furthermore argued for intentionality as part of imagination. Imagination involves a palpable engagement with the environment. Advocating for thinking through making, he discussed how “sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or ‘correspond,’ with one another in the generation of form” (Ingold, 2013, cover). Epistemologically, Ingold argued for a shift from dichotomizing technology, language, and intelligence on the one hand and craft, song, and imagination on the other. The first triad, including the scientific disciplines to which they belong, is, in his thinking, not only “recent products of a very specific history in the Western world,” it is also “grounded in a general claim to the supremacy of human reason” (Ingold, 2000, p. 406). Although this triad has priority (in Western thinking), Ingold radically suggested the opposite. Based on his reasoning on human beings as dwelling in social and material contexts, or environments as he put it, the two triads are intricately interwoven and part of each other. For instance, “to listen to music is to dwell in a world of sound, which permeates our entire awareness” (Ingold, 2000, p. 407). For example, Sand (2014, 2017) illustrated how Danish youth hung out and sensed a specific type of architecture and urban rhythms to create various self-organized multisensory events, such as concerts under bridges with visual installations and raves in abandoned buildings. The type of architecture was described as a “grey oasis,” resembling Edensor’s (2005) “industrial ruins.” Sensing the material environment was essential in organizing the events. We argue that skateboarders dwell in urban environments as skilled practitioners able to attune movements “to perturbations in the perceived environment without ever interrupting the flow of action, since the action itself is a process of attention” (Ingold, 2000, p. 415). As dwellers and makers, the skateboarders in our studies encounter urban architecture and specific obstacles not as objects, but as a possibly skateable environment. They imagine skateability. In this sense, imagining is an activity utterly part of dwelling and of the dwelt-in world. Dwelling is not just a question of skateboarding in social environments for skateboarders, but also imagining new material affordances (Gibson, 1979). Vivoni suggested that urban skateboarding unleashes desire and that skateboarding in the streets “hints at the hidden potential of unintended spatial desires through the creative engagement of bodies and boards with built forms” (Vivoni, 2009, p. 140). As previously mentioned, this spatial lust consists of “keen perception and savvy mobility [that] enable the experience of unimagined pleasures throughout the built environment” (Vivoni, 2009, p. 142). In other words, spatial desire is an attraction to urban material encounters, in this case through skateboarding. Borden (2001) had similar ideas. He proposed that skateboarding “produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires” (p. 1). What he described as super-architectural space is produced when the skateboarder meets with the urban environment, and this is more than the meeting of skateboarder, skateboard, and terrain. Moreover, it is distinct from architecture-as-object, architecture-as-drawing, and architecture-as-idea. Rather, it is similar to what Ingold (2000) discussed as a tied-together triad and later as making (Ingold, 2013). Borden described it as “a rhythmical procedure, continually repeated yet forever new, like the waves of the sea, the playing of music or the declamation of poetry” (Borden, 2001, p. 262).

Data and Methodological Considerations

The empirical material presented in this article originates from two separate studies that employed a range of qualitative methods and were carried out in two different countries: Denmark and Sweden. Both studies were ethnographic. The Danish study was a multisited (Hannerz, 2003), ethnographically inspired fieldwork (Pink & Morgan, 2013) carried out between 2015 and 2016. Semiorganized projects in seven different movement cultures (skateboarding, parkour, urban climbing, shuffling, soccer, street handball, and yoga) were explored in different Danish cities. The overall aim of the research project was to explore organization, funding, spatiality, and the practitioners understanding of making (Ingold, 2013). All research participants in this project had applied for funding from the National Platform for Street Sports (http://gadeidraet.dk/) to realize various street-sport projects.¹ For this article, skateboarding data have been selected. These data include interviews driven by photo elicitation (Pink & Bäckström, 2015; Pink, 2011) with five skateboarders, observations of their online dialogues (Hine, 2000; Spradley, 1980) and photographs taken by the skateboarders themselves. Online ethnographic fieldwork in a secret, do-it-yourself skateboarders’ Facebook group gained insights to their social negotiations, project development, design processes, and quality standards. The data also include an interview with an urban architect, Søren Enevoldsen, who is a practicing skateboarder.

The Swedish ethnographic work also focused on skateboarding in multiple contexts and had sensoriality, learning, and femininity at its axis (e.g., Bäckström, 2013, 2014, 2018). The data collection took part in both outdoor and indoor skateparks, city environments, and other contexts related to skateboarding. The empirical material consists of 2,500 photographs, 12 filmed sequences, 15 semistructured interviews (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015), and field notes from approximately 300 hr of sensory participation (Pink, 2015). The majority of the material was collected between 2008 and 2010. For this article, empirical material from the city of Malmö was selected. The research participants (68 in total) in the Swedish project who had a local connection to this city framed it as the most skateable city in Sweden with its many skateparks. These research participants also talked about local authorities in mainly a positive way. Located in a newer part of the city in an old shipyard slipway, Stapelbäddsparken is a 3,000 m², free-to-visit public park. It was launched in 2005 in cooperation between skateboarders and local authorities. Today, the skatepark has its own hashtag on social media and a webpage in both Swedish and English (http://www.stapelbaddsparken.se/).

The two fieldwork studies were different in terms of the numbers of participants and observations, the participants’ genders, the research questions, and the fieldwork locations, but they also share a range of similarities. These similarities enabled us to correlate findings from our materials and studies together. A strong common theoretical interest for us as researchers, of relevance for this article, concerns the phenomenological approach to urban material environments (Grosz, 1992; Ingold, 2000, 2010, 2013; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005), which analytically unfolds in a variety of embodied, spatial, temporal, and social ways. This interest resonates with our backgrounds in social anthropology, which we both share, and which informs our methodological choices (Fors, Bäckström & Pink, 2013; Pink, 2015). These two combinable strands oriented our analytical work on the sensing, moving body in a material environment, which is developed further below.

Denmark and Sweden are situated in northern Europe, and both countries are part of the European Union. Aarhus and Malmö, the cities where our respective fieldworks were conducted, are located in different countries and have different official languages. Nevertheless, the locations are merely 4 hr apart by train and have many social and cultural similarities, not least when it comes to architecture, urban design, and everyday life. Both ethnographies focus on young people. As researchers, we take the voices and practices of young people seriously. Inspired by anthropological youth studies (Amit, 2001; Bucholtz, 2002), we have made substantial efforts to represent the practices and perspective of the particular young people in our studies in a just manner. For reasons of confidentiality, we use pseudonyms for the cited research participants apart from Søren Enevoldsen, a well-recognized skateboarding architect in Denmark who preferred to be cited by his real name.

The following analysis was developed during a year through a process aided by various digital media: co-writing in a joint document; adding to, subtracting from and commenting on each other’s text; discussions in Skype meetings; and finally returning to the development of the text. The analytical process began with a workshop in Aarhus, where we discussed overlapping themes in our respective empirical materials and compared the visual material from the two fieldworks. The analysis was developed through a process whose overall aim was to openly read the material for patterns and categories (Bernard, 1994). This open analytical process was followed by a dialectic process between the empirical themes and potential theoretical perspectives. This analytical dialogue was supported and driven by our research questions on the role of imagination in skateboarders’ emplaced encounters, the relationship between materiality and imagination, and the overall question of how to understand skateboarders’ spatial desire. The analytical themes structuring the following section are the result of this diligent process.

Analysis

In this section, we show how the skateboarders in our studies imagined and made their encounters with the environment. Their imaginations were part of ongoing individual and collective processes, including memories of past experiences, previous material encounters, and social negotiations. Moreover, these imaginations and makings had a component of imaginary novelty and did not exist only in the mind but were also highly corporeal and material. In addition, they were a tied-together triad, not parts but a whole in space and time (Ingold, 2000). They were, as Borden (2001, p. 262) put it, “a rhythmical procedure, continually repeated yet forever new.” The skateboarders’ imaginations were, we argue, driven by what Vivoni (2009) discussed as spatial desire.

In the following, we first analyze how skateboarders from Aarhus and Malmö were imagining and making transitions and smooth lines and how they redefined specific types of materiality, both temporal and permanent, through an imaginary process stretched out in time. In the second part, “Imagining and corresponding with challenging and kind obstacles” we analyze the ways in which material imaginings are constructed through a desire to use the body in a specific way and in certain locations. In the third part, “Imagining mutual material experiences corresponding with changing environments,” we analyze how the imaginary processes take mutual understanding for granted and how this is a social process and a process of deeply engaging the body and the material environment. Furthermore, we analyze the importance of an ever-changing environment for innovative and imaginative skateboarding practice. Importantly, we define imagination as something that is not only derived from previous experiences but as something that engages future correspondences with the environment.

Imagining and Making Transitions and Smooth Lines

The skateboarders in Aarhus (Denmark) preferred street skateboarding. They moved around the city streets in search for skateable places. This practice was described by the research participants as “reading the city,” which resembles the practices of skateboarders in London (Borden, 2001). The practice indicates a specific way to view the city, which includes interpreting and imagining the city for spatial and skateable material opportunities. As skilled practitioners, they desired smooth runs in the urban environment, and they imagined transitions where there were gaps. Through adjustments to the architecture, they made the city cater to their imagined material desire. The skateboarders in Aarhus called this “skate-optimising the city.” The process is illustrated in the following three photographs (Figure 1), which were taken at three different spots in Aarhus by the research participants themselves.

Figure 1.

Skateboarders imagine transitions where there are gaps and adjust urban architecture, AArhus, November, 2015.

The skateboarders had chosen the spots because of the architectural design and how challenging they imagined the spots would be to skate. A common element for the three chosen locations was that they were not designed for skateboarding, but by making minor material adjustments, they became skateable. In all three photos, they made what they called “a run-up,” which was aimed at the transition between the pavement and the railing. In the first photo, they made a small gap between the bricks smoother with firm foam and duct tape. The second and third pictures show how they covered a crack with plates and duct tape. The crack was found in front of a handrail that they wanted to skate. These installations were all temporary. To make more permanent installations they sometimes used the hardener Bondo, a quick hardener that could fill out unevenness in the pavement or between tiles.

In an interview, Kristian explained, “we used plates and duct tape and make a run-up, so we can skate the surface. We have been there ten times to study the materiality, so we know what materials we need. Then we go there and make it” (Interview, November 2015). First, they described the practice of spotting places in the city that were not intentionally made for skateboarding but had potential affordances (Gibson, 1979). They imagined the material affordances and discussed how to explore them. As part of the imaginary process, they critically reflected upon the materiality, surroundings, and design. As shown in the three photos, they saw skateboarding potential in the handrails beside the stairs. They critically reconstructed the material environment. This provides insight into how skateboarders’ emplacements can be made through minimal materials, made at low cost and carried out within a relatively short timeline. These types of emplaced practices stand in contrast to the more general ways that skateboarding facilities are designed and planned.

A tendency within city planning is to make bricks and rough transitions that lead up to benches, railings, and potential skateable surfaces, in a way that hinders skateboarders in that specific urban space (de Fine Licht, 2017; Németh, 2006). The above example illustrates how architectural barriers rather generate new spatial desires and imaginations. Borden (2001) described similar practices in London as performative architectural critique. Framed as making, the practices may be described as a process of growth (Ingold, 2013).

This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what he has to work with, and in the process of making he “joins forces” with them, bringing them together instead of splitting them apart, synthesising and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge. [. . .] Even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials. (Ingold, 2013, pp. 21-22)

According to Ingold, the maker needs to position himself as a sensory-aware participant among materials to let materials take form, not linearly, but in situ or over time. The skateboarders’ engagement with the process of making skateboard facilities illustrates the interrelatedness of process and product. In contrast to permanent skateboarding facilities and similar facilities for movement in general, these types of temporary installations change the spatial environments from one day to the other.

In a walk-and-talk interview focusing on the sensory experiences (Pink, 2015; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014) in the local skatepark Stapelbäddsparken in Malmö, Sweden, Sandra also imagined transitions and smooth lines although in a slightly different manner. For her, other skateboarders confined the space, and she preferred to use it when it was less crowded as it allowed for a way to use the space more freely and to move around a larger area.

Sandra:

I don’t like to ride the bowls when there are too many people. It is easy to run into someone. It is a hundred times nicer to skate there at night when it is empty. [. . .] Here is a bend and a bump. [. . .] You can go back and forth between the bumps and over the spine and over to the other side. It’s a nice place to skate. Nice bends and curves.

Åsa Bäckström:

If you had this entire place to yourself, where would you be then?

Sandra:

Everywhere. I would be everywhere. That’s what’s nice by skating at night. Then you can ride from here to there, to there and back here again. (Interview, June 2008)

As dwellers and skilled practitioners, the skateboarders in our studies imagined transitions and smooth lines in environments, both the environments built for skateboarding as in the latter case and in urban architecture built mainly with other users in mind as in the previous case. Both the material and the social environment are important for the imaginative process. According to Vivoni (2009, p. 145), spatial desires unfold somewhere in between dominance and resistance. For the skateboarders in our studies, this tension appeared in relation to built forms as the skateboarders in Denmark adjusted, or in their own wording, “skate-optimised.” They resisted the way it was originally built and created a new temporary skate spot for themselves. This process was imagined, negotiated, planned, and performed or made, in Ingold’s (2013) terms. In the Swedish case, the tension between dominance and resistance rather had a social character. Sandra explained how she resisted the social domination of an overcrowded skatepark by using it at night. In the interview, she imagined the possibility of being “everywhere” in the skatepark, of taking it all into use and the transitions between the parts, its “bends and curves,” would become smooth lines in her riding.

In both cases, the imaginative processes included the combinations of material and social aspects as well as dimensions of time. It was an integrated process of skateboarding skills, previous emplaced experience, and the desire for future engagements with materiality. These processes included complex calculations of speed, flow, and also risk. It is a question of engaging with processes of potential affordances and, as such, is related to craftsmanship (Ingold, 2013, p. 413). Imagining spatial pleasure in the form of transitions and smooth lines may thus be explained in terms of “keen perception” in which remembrances of previous “savvy mobility” (e.g., Vivoni, 2009, p. 142) turn into creative engagements to realize new spatial encounters. Importantly, it is not just a “below-the-knees” practice, but a reflexive, material practice involving the whole body. The imaginative micro-decisions made by the skateboarders in our studies are, in other words, emplaced.

Transitions and smooth lines appeared in different ways exemplified in the two cases above. However, the transition, was general, frequent, and significant to the majority of skateboarders in our two studies. Transitions and smooth lines are thus representative for what could be described as a content of imagined spatial pleasure, although transitions and smooth lines should by no means be regarded as the sole content.

Imagining and Corresponding With Challenging and “Kind” Obstacles

Besides transitions and smooth lines, the skateboarders in our studies imagined obstacles as both challenging, “kind” and the continuum in between. In this case, kind is the antonym of challenging. For Kristian and Villads in the Danish study, the challenging obstacles were particularly sought after, and these obstacles could only be found in the streets, not in skateparks or other specifically designed skateboarding environments. To them, “street” encompassed an explorative attitude toward the material environment in what they described as an “obstruction” [benspænd, Danish].

Kristian:

You are used to doing it the same way, but then you change it. It’s the same if you are right handed and start to write with left hand. That is an obstruction.

Villads:

It is difficult to explain. It requires skills.

Kristian:

It is all about people who want to be free on their board in everything they do. That means, that there are things you need to force yourself into, which might be difficult, uncomfortable and risky, but you just have to do it even though it is challenging. You exceed the limits for what you think you can and what you feel comfortable with. (Interview, October 2015)

These young men imagined a particular material encounter, that is, an encounter with a challenging quality, which they described as an obstruction. It is the way in which they challenge and exceed the embodied encounter with materiality that simultaneously forces them to think differently with their bodies. Hereby, they change an important kind of logic within their habituated practice. In doing so, they resituate and imagine potential obstructions related to challenges and to pushing the boundaries of what they feel comfortable with. Furthermore, obstructions, as a part of their imagining, are not only related to a mental design or idea. As Kristian explains it, obstructions are new embodied experiences that might at first be uncomfortable due to the risk inherent in doing something unknown. They specifically search for uncertainty, which can be seen as a form of obstruction. In the interview, they talked about how they were out in the streets skateboarding one evening and without planning it, they used a random material they coincidentally passed by. Kristian explained the emplaced practice in the following way:

It was stuff like pallets and plates that was laying there on the ground, and we were on our way down to Sct. Knuds Torv, and I guess it was you, Villads, that turned around and said “Hey, I think that could be a . . . ,” and then we turned around and built a box to skate. It actually took three hours. (Interview, October 2015)

The empirical example illustrates that even though they were aiming for a specific destination (Sct. Knuds Torv, Aarhus) they had an emplaced awareness that made them capable of sensing the physical environment they passed on the way. They improvise, they “follow the ways of the world as they unfold” (Ingold, 2010, p. 10). A similar sensitivity to the surroundings is seen in jazz improvisation, which make jazz music a practice in situ (Barrett, 1998). To them, the imaginary is not related to the specific material they passed by but to an exploratory attitude and sensory openness that allows them to act in situ. The temporary construction made it even more special to skateboard the specific spot because it was removed the following day by construction workers.

In Malmö, Sandra showed her favorite parts of the skatepark Stapelbäddsparken and discussed its pros and cons. Sandra is a competent, noted, and sponsored skateboarder. Nevertheless, she appreciated the park’s street area partly because she thought it was kind, that is, not too demanding. She valued the obstacles, but also the fact that they were well known to her.

This is the street area. Most of the people who like street skating are here, and there are often less people here too, compared to the bowls. [. . .] It is a good place to practice, to just play around and learn new tricks. It’s pretty kind, not too many things. (Interview, June 2008)

The emplaced kindness of the area is attributed to the sparse appearance of the obstacles but also to the space being less crowded. To Sandra, this kindness provided the possibility to practice and play. Moreover, the playfulness and kindness of this area was supported by recognized and movable obstacles.

Some things are added, and many things are portable, so you can move them around. Certain things here were at Bryggeriet [the local indoor skatepark] before; for example, that curb and the quarter pipe over there. Maybe they build something and then bring it here in the summer? This is pretty new, it came this year. (Interview, June 2008)

Despite her high-level skateboarding, Sandra still appreciated a less demanding space. Interestingly, these less challenging obstacles and the less crowded space enabled creativity in terms of moving the obstacles to a temporary space of her liking.

In both studies, the research participants yearned for obstacles that were demanding but to various degrees. For Kristian and Villads in Aarhus, the obstacles needed to be challenging obstructions, but for Sandra, this was less the case. They are all emplaced dwellers moving through the environment who sense possibilities of urban material encounters through skateboarding. As skateboarders, they corresponded with the materiality of their surroundings and were intrigued by resistance in the material environment. Imagining material encounters included imagining the characteristics of the materiality along a continuum between obstruction and kindness. Moreover, their imaginations showed how form, matter, and their sentient bodies corresponded, that is, responded to one another.

Imagining Mutual Material Experiences Corresponding With Changing Environments

As shown above, skateboarders in our studies changed urban architecture through imagined and emplaced practices for alternative purposes, and even skateparks proved to be changeable. Ironically, changeability may well be one of the persistent traits of a successful skate spot. In 2008, when the skatepark in Sibbarp, a neighborhood of Malmö, was being built, it attracted riders who skated what they could while awaiting its finalization. Some parts of the concrete area were skateable, while other parts were still waiting to be constructed (see Figure 2). This skatepark was going to be “meaty,” according to the builder. In a discussion during the fieldwork, the builder and Karolina were vividly discussing the parts under construction using this fleshy expression as they imagined what it would feel like in the body to ride here once ready. This space would be tight and close. Their imagining was emplaced as it involved the material environment. The skateboarding body would experience it as meaty, they unanimously agreed. When probed what that meant, they had trouble explaining further in words. Instead, Karolina used her hands and arms to make short, hasty movements with sudden stops. The builder laughed in confirmation, saying “exactly.” Although language did not suffice, they were convinced that they knew exactly what the other one meant. They imagined a mutual material experience in this changing environment.

Figure 2.

A skatepark in the making, Sibbarp, sweden, June 2008.

In an interview with the Danish urban architect Søren Enevoldsen, founder of SNE Architects, he prophesied that future skateboarding architecture would consist of more than skateboarding facilities. He imagined a diverse and multifunctional social space. As a practicing skateboarder and a trained architect who designs skateable terrain, he declared the most significant feature of a well-designed place for skateboarding in terms of freedom from compelling architecture. Søren even dissociated himself from using the term skatepark.

A fundamental idea in skateboarding is that you redefine the meaning of your surroundings through interaction with the urban elements, and from that perspective, one can argue that a skatepark stands in contrast to the basis of skateboarding, since it is an area with predefined functions. It [a skatepark] is a kind of amusement park, and often they are areas totally unrelated to their adjacent surroundings. (Interview, February 2016)

To Søren, an amusement park is a place where single-purpose rides and attractions limit the experience. He would rather see skateboarding architecture integrated with other functions to create combinations and connections in multifunctional and unexpected spaces. These spaces are, in his words, also mental spaces where spatial encounters can be imagined and further practiced.

In a lot of my designs, I try to create spaces where people have the opportunity to define their own mental space. Places where skateboarders and other users seeing it would think, “It isn’t just a skatepark, it isn’t a performance scene, it isn’t a rainwater container, it isn’t just a playground for children.” [. . .] I really like to design interpretable urban spaces that are friendly to multiple types of movement. And, if possible, [I like to create] the feeling that the area is something that the skateboarder found him/herself and, in that way, get closer to the central aspect of skateboarding. (Interview, February 2016)

For Søren, a skateboarding space must include an unexpected aspect, something surprising to be discovered. In the skatepark being built in Sibbarp, the evolving concrete surfaces were being explored in the same place that they were being built, and at the same time, the evolving space was imagined as meaty. For Sandra in Stapelbäddsparken, the annual repainting of a specific bowl was described in material terms. When features changed it was the perception of the perceived skateable architecture that was important (see Figure 3).

Sandra:

The pool, which is now red, it is designed as a backyard pool that you can find in the US. In Sweden you can’t easily find pools like this. But it is built for skateboarding, so it is easier to skate than a real backyard pool. [. . .] It is painted this year as a running course. [. . .] They change it every year. You have to be in control when riding it, otherwise you can get hurt. The curves are tight, and the concrete is hard.

Åsa Bäckström:

What about the painting? Does it matter?

Sandra:

Yes, it may differ, if it is painted, sometimes it might be more slippery, but they make it as good as they can [for skateboarding]. [. . .] It is important to have shadows as reference points when you ride, otherwise it would be really difficult. The lines in the red pool and now the marks from skateboarding make it easier to know where you are going. (Interview, June 2008)

Figure 3.

The red pool designed as a U.S. backyard swimming pool and its lines which made it easier to navigate although paint might make it slightly more slippery than raw concrete, Malmö, Sweden, June 2008.

The above examples illustrate the joy of discovery and changing environments in skateboarding. Søren, Karolina, and Sandra also discussed how their skateboarding practices corresponded with the environment. Although Søren described a mental space, he also talked about redefining meaning though interaction with urban elements. For Karolina and the construction worker, the materializing skatepark was verbalized as meaty, and Sandra noted how the painted bowl might make it more slippery. The bright red color was of minor importance. Ingold argued that people “‘feel their way’ through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-human agencies” (Ingold, 2000, p. 155).

Conclusion

In this article, we analyzed the ways in which certain Swedish and Danish skateboarders engage with their urban environments. Our aim was to describe and analyze how skateboarders develop their encounters with material urban space by imagining and practicing movement through it. Vivoni’s (2009, p. 142) conceptualization of spatial desire sparked our interest in further exploring skateboarders “keen perception and savvy mobility” and their “experience of unimagined pleasures throughout the built environment.” We developed our thinking by scrutinizing our respective ethnographic materials and by iteratively expounding on anthropological and phenomenological theoretical work in which we both have interest and previous experience. By adopting Vivoni’s concept of spatial desire, we pinpointed the attraction of urban material encounters in skateboarding. However, we called into question his idea of these pleasures as “unimagined” by rethinking spatial desire through the concepts of imagining and emplacement as developed in anthropology. The skateboarders we interviewed had difficulties verbalizing the attraction of urban material encounters, but they were highly capable of imagining these encounters and expressing their imaginations in other ways—for instance, by showing with their hands the future meaty experience of riding a particular skatepark. These imaginings were also expressed to be mutual, thus assuming a common understanding.

Drawing from anthropological and phenomenological theoretical work (Ingold, 2000, 2010, 2013) and inspired by recent spatial thinking (see Lefebvre, 1991, 2004; Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2008), we furthermore highlighted how spatial desire should reasonably be discussed as emplaced. A shift from embodiment to emplacement allows for thinking beyond the body, ourselves, and the human. Ingold’s elaborations on dwelling (Ingold, 2000) and making (Ingold, 2013) suggest the idea of materialization and formation, that is, of form and matter as corresponding, of materials as active, and of practitioners as sentient. In line with Ingold’s thinking, we argued that skateboarders dwell in urban environments as skilled practitioners who are able to attune their movements to their environment. Similar to Vivoni (2009), the research participants in our study “felt the city,” but they also imagined potential material formations. When Kristian and Villads skateboarded toward a specific destination in Aarhus, they allowed their emplaced awareness to influence their route and stopped to improvise. Or as Ingold (2010) might have described it, “they follow the ways of the world as they unfold” (p. 10).

Our empirical research was organized along three themes derived from our analysis. The first theme, imagining and making transitions and smooth lines, showed how the skateboarders imagined and made these types of material encounters. In the Danish example, making transitions in the urban environment enhanced skateability. In the Swedish example, transitions were imagined as both shifts between the parts of a skatepark, its “bends and curves,” and how these transitions would become smooth lines in Sandra’s skateboarding. We concluded that transitions and smooth lines are representative of what could be described as a content of imagined spatial pleasure, although it is not the sole content. In this way, our analysis also offered a theoretical comment on these frequent expressions in skateboarding terminology.

The second theme, imagining and corresponding with challenging and kind obstacles, discussed the characteristics of the imagined spatial encounters. Kristian and Villads were interested in demanding obstacles in the urban environment and expressed the challenging characteristics of these obstacles in terms of obstructions. Sandra, contrary, rather wished for kind obstacles. All skateboarders in our studies searched for resistance in the material environment. Although we acknowledge large variations in the continuum between challenging and kind obstacles, we suggest that the yearning for demanding material encounters could be explained as skateboarders’ spatial desire.

The third theme, imagining mutual material experiences corresponding with changing environments, described how making and imagining worked as processes. Both making and imagining took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the sentient body and the ever-changing and active material environment. Søren, Karolina, and Sandra felt their way through the ever-changing world. Movement in a moving world and its corresponding changeability seemed to be an ironically persistent trait of a successful skate spot.

Finally, we argue that spatial desire is a crucial concept for research on skateboarding that can be fruitful to explorations of other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore. In our analysis, spatial desire was understood as being conjured up by making and imagining. However, in contrast with the unimagined pleasures that Vivoni discussed, we defined them as highly imaginable and emplaced. Through Ingold’s conceptualizations, we saw making and imagining as materialization and formation, including the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Our findings expand from previous theoretical and empirical work and have consequences for how we may think about the relationships between ourselves, what we do and our environment, not only in skateboarding but everywhere. Analyzing skateboarders’ practices provided support for the theoretical ideas of emplacement, not least the intricate entanglements between form and matter. We invite further research to explore these intriguing relationships both in skateboarding and beyond. Spatial imagination as described above could most certainly have varying content and characteristics. Moreover, the complexities related to, for instance, speed, flow, rhythm, and the sociocultural meaning potential (such as governance and liberation) await analytical consideration. Thus, we call for further investigation to understand the relationships between imaginary and emplaced urban practices and the sensory dimensions involved.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) funded the Swedish study (project number 2007-4033). Carlsberg Foundation provided financial support for the Danish study.

Notes

ORCID iD

Åsa Bäckström

Author Biographies

Åsa Bäckström is an associate professor in Sport Sciences at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research focuses on informal learning processes and femininity.

Anne-Lene Sand is an assistant professor at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on self- and semi-organized practices with a specific interest in improvisation.

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